This month, Microsoft is celebrating our fiftieth anniversary. To assist commemorate fifty years of making know-how that empowers individuals to realize extra, our AI for Good Lab launched an open name to assist progressive AI-based initiatives right here in Washington State.
Our AI for Good Lab has been utilizing AI to sort out international challenges and enhance lives since 2018. We open-source our fashions, information, and instruments so everybody can bounce in, working collectively to make actual impression. At a time when nonprofits, NGOs, and educational establishments are tasked with doing extra with much less, know-how like AI gives a approach ahead.
Via these awards, we’re investing $5 million over the subsequent two years. This open name permits us to broaden our commitments to quite a few superb initiatives whereas partaking a variety of recent organizations throughout the state of Washington. The 20 awardees will obtain Microsoft Azure credit and the flexibility to collaborate with AI for Good Lab scientists.
We’re thrilled to proceed to domesticate relationships with progressive companions on this nice state and the world at massive. These game-changing organizations and initiatives usually are not solely serving to clear up immediately’s challenges, they’re additionally paving the best way for a brighter tomorrow. We’re honored to share the next as our 2025 open name awardees.
Sustainability
Awardee: Inventory-Good.com – Washington State College Extension
Mission description: Washington State’s federal, state, tribal, and personal land managers and livestock grazers are all starting to make use of digital fence techniques to fine-tune ecological grazing administration. Inventory-Good.com combines predicted livestock terrain use with satellite-based forage manufacturing information to tell grazing plans for livestock herds. By utilizing AI-guided interpretation of digital fence system geolocation information, Inventory-Good.com helps scale back wildfire danger, improve wildlife habitats, and enhance invasive species management.
Awardee: Lengthy Stay the Kings
Mission description: Within the Puget Sound, the impacts of fast urbanization are compounded by local weather change. Lengthy Stay the Kings employs AI and machine studying to mechanically calibrate a 3D ecosystem modeling program for Puget Sound. This undertaking will use the emulator to discover how cumulative watershed impacts have an effect on ecosystem providers and biodiversity to advance pure useful resource administration in Puget Sound.
Awardee: TealWaters
Mission description: TealWaters works to rework Washington State’s water administration capability by offering instruments that inform and information wetlands plannTealWaters plans to assist AI mannequin testing past the scope of its present instruments to extend communities’ resilience to local weather change and environmental stressors.
Awardee: Washington State College
Mission description: Local weather change places residents of Washington State at greater danger of harmful wildfires. This undertaking will develop cutting-edge AI fashions, fusing satellite tv for pc imagery, climate information, constructing data, and wildfire simulation outcomes to evaluate wildfire vulnerability of residential buildings in Washington State. By producing vulnerability assessments that embody confidence scores, this multi-modal method may also help information efficient wildfire mitigation efforts.
Awardee: Cornell College, Round Development Lab
Mission description: Reusing supplies is the simplest round financial system technique: it reduces waste and emissions, creates native inexperienced jobs, and helps native reuse ecosystems. AR3-Lumber goals to develop and implement AI-powered know-how to reuse salvaged lumber via an area partnership with the Seattle Salvaged Lumber Warehouse. This undertaking will allow AR3-Lumber to supply important technical and methodological assist to the round lumber financial system.
Awardee: Woodland Park Zoo
Mission description: The Seattle City Carnivore Mission goals to extend our understanding of and empathy for city carnivores akin to black bears by learning how these species stay and work together with individuals throughout the higher Seattle area. This undertaking will embody a wildlife digital camera and bioacoustics monitoring program that collects information from inexperienced areas throughout central King County and Bainbridge Island, using AI to determine the variety and density of species in city corridors in a approach that’s environment friendly and consumes fewer assets.
Awardee: Conservation X Labs
Mission description: Conservation X Labs goals to stop the sixth mass extinction by creating and democratizing progressive applied sciences to vary what’s attainable in conservation. The undertaking will develop and deploy a multi-species administration detection algorithm on a sensible digital camera system to create a primary –of –its –sort, real-time monitoring system for illness in wildlife that may be utilized by veterinarians, ecologists, and conservationists throughout Washington State.
Awardee: NOAA-Nationwide Marine Fisheries Service – Habitat Conservation
Mission description: Present strategies of water administration and salmon habitat restoration within the Columbia River Basin are usually both hyper-localized or computationally intensive. This undertaking goals to make use of distant sensing and machine studying to categorise wetlands to raised predict how water administration choices and local weather change impression salmon populations and assist simpler conservation methods.
Awardee: Data Communication and Know-how for Improvement (ICTD) on the College of Washington
Mission description: Extra plant and animal species are threatened with extinction now than at some other time in human historical past. The Data Communication and Know-how for Improvement division on the College of Washington plans to watch wildlife utilizing audiovisual channels on tiny compute units, fostering a greater understanding of animal populations intricately linked to meals security, illness unfold, and biodiversity.
Well being
Awardee: Covid Detection Basis’s Virufy
Mission description: Older adults in assisted dwelling, senior care houses, and long-term care amenities are significantly weak to respiratory infections. This undertaking goals to develop an AI-powered screening instrument to detect pneumonia in older adults dwelling in residential care amenities throughout Washington State. The instrument will allow real-time information evaluation and scalable deployment in varied care settings, enhancing healthcare outcomes and high quality of life for weak populations.
Awardee: Windfall
Mission description: Present strategies for figuring out sufferers for medical trials depend on handbook screening processes that miss many sufferers—particularly these from underserved communities—or depend on sick sufferers and their docs to do the work of looking for out there trials. Windfall and Microsoft Well being Futures are collaboratively growing Trial Join, an AI instrument that scans population-level medical information throughout Washington State to determine sufferers who qualify for medical trials that might save their lives.
Awardee: Institute for Well being Metrics and Analysis
Mission description: Information from the Institute for Well being Metrics and Analysis (IHME) are utilized by greater than 13,000 researchers world wide. IHME plans to construct a worldwide cloud laboratory to look at well being regionally, utilizing satellite tv for pc imagery, AI, and spatial demography to foretell dangers like drought and meals insecurity to particular populations. This undertaking goals to place actionable, population-level well being information into the arms of decision-makers to enhance people’ well being and wellbeing.
Awardee: College of Washington Radiology
Mission description: To enhance public well being and assist sufferers of their most difficult moments, the College of Washington created self-improving massive language fashions to translate radiology report findings into patient-friendly language. Sufferers will obtain clear, lay-language explanations of their imaging outcomes whereas healthcare suppliers present suggestions that will likely be used to refine the mannequin, making certain steady enchancment, lowering misunderstandings, and fostering higher communication between sufferers and medical professionals.
Awardee: Institute for Protein Design – College of Washington
Mission description: Generative AI has already had a big impression ion protein construction prediction and protein design. This undertaking goals to develop at the very least three specialised, open-source fashions, together with a next-generation biomolecule design mannequin, a mannequin specialised for antibody/antigen construction and antibody design, and a mannequin specialised for protein/ligand interactions to allow the subsequent era of therapeutics and biomaterials.
Awardee: Washington State College Division of Chemistry
Mission description: Heavy and radioactive metallic contamination in Spokane and Hanford threatens neighborhood well being. This undertaking will leverage geochemistry and huge language fashions to construct a publicly accessible dataset that can support in designing efficient soil decontamination strategies for Spokane and Hanford, contributing to a cleaner, more healthy atmosphere for Washington residents.
Schooling/Public Good
Awardee: Washington State College
Mission description: Rural elementary academics in Washington usually wrestle to design high-quality science assessments as a consequence of limitations round assets, skilled growth alternatives, and entry to know-how. This undertaking will develop and deploy an AI-powered multi-agent evaluation system to empower rural Washington elementary academics and improve accessibility, engagement, and tutorial effectiveness.
Awardee: Evergreen Goodwill of Northwest Washington
Mission description: Rising labor and enterprise prices have diminished the flexibility for Evergreen Goodwill to advance their mission of offering high quality, free job coaching and fundamental schooling to individuals experiencing important limitations to financial alternative. The undertaking will use an AI-powered automated donation ingestion and cataloging system to sort out the backlogged volumes of donated items obtained by Evergreen Goodwill. By doing so, the undertaking will scale back waste, enhance effectivity, and unlock new alternatives for scale and profitability.
Awardee: Washington State College – Group Argumentation Coordinator
Mission description: This undertaking supplies science academics in Washington State with an AI-powered instrument referred to as a Group Argumentation Coordinator that can scale back the burden on overwhelmed academics and enhance college students’ studying expertise in science school rooms throughout the state. The undertaking promotes real-time assist for argumentation-based science studying in numerous school rooms. The 2-year plan supported by this award focuses on system growth, small-scale classroom pilots, and instructor suggestions integration to make sure usability, equity, and transparency.
Awardee: Washington State College – WARNS
Mission description: The Washington Evaluation of Threat and Wants of College students (WARNS) has successfully assessed the wants important to wholesome social, emotional, and academic growth of center college and highschool college students throughout the state. This undertaking will develop an elementary-level model of this evaluation, leveraging massive language fashions to scale back absenteeism and forestall dropouts amongst elementary college college students by initiating a dialogue with college students about what they should thrive within the classroom.
Awardee: Huge Brothers Huge Sisters of Puget Sound
Mission description: The Puget Sound department of Huge Brothers Huge Sisters is confronted with the problem of a 100 –day-long waitlist for households trying to take part of their mentorship program. Via a partnership with KPMG and Microsoft, Huge Brothers Huge Sisters developed an AI instrument, AIMRE, to course of massive datasets on their waitlist and enhance each the standard and timeliness of youth/mentor matches. This award will enable Huge Brothers Huge Sisters to conduct additional testing and deploy AIMRE regionally, finally scaling nationally to hurry up the matching course of for youths throughout the nation.
We’re thrilled to assist these 20 initiatives of their efforts to harness the transformative energy of AI to unravel challenges throughout Washington State and past.
